Recalling July 4, 1999

At the time of his suicide on July 4, 1999, Benjamin Nathaniel Smith was 22 years-old. He was a member the neo-Nazi World Church of the Creator, and under the spell of a vicious if charismatic racist leader, Matthew Hale. During that Fourth of July weekend, Smith targeted members of racial and ethnic minorities in drive-by shootings in the Midwest.

Smith had a significant connection to the UIUC campus. He was a student here until he was expelled in 1998 over domestic violence charges and posting racist literature. Influenced by Hale’s Pekin-based “Creativity Church,” he returned to the Urbana side of campus on July 3rd, shooting at African-Americans and Asians near the spot where a Chinese student was apparently abducted by a white male several weeks ago. Next, he travelled to Decatur, where he shot and wounded an African-American minister.

The day before, he went to a mostly Jewish neighborhood in Chicago, where he shot and wounded nine Orthodox Jews in drive-by shootings. Smith then shot and killed former Northwestern University basketball coach Ricky Byrdsong, an African-American, in front of two of Byrdsong’s children while they were walking outside their home in Skokie.

On the Fourth of July, Smith traveled to Bloomington, Indiana. There, he killed Won-Joon Yoon, a 26-year-old Korean graduate student in Economics at Indiana University, who was on his way to the Korean United Methodist Church. Smith committed suicide while attempting to elude the police.

Smith is dead but his violent white supremacy movement has grown exponentially. The Ku Klux Klan Act was passed in 1871 as a response to lynchings and mob terror committed by the newly formed remnant of the defeated Confederate army. The KKK’s main goal was to keep African-Americans and their liberal political supporters in a state of paralyzed terror as well as political disenfranchisement.

Parts of the law were ruled unconstitutional by conservative Supreme Court justices. The criminal law element was ruled as an unconstitutional usurpation of state law—a warped reading of post-Civil War amendments that were enacted because southern states would not treat African-Americans and their liberal supporters as equal to white citizens. (See above, a version of the American flag, circa 1865.)

For 90 years, the Ku Klux Klan Act laid dormant until Griffin v. Breckinridge (1971). Griffin and several other African-Americans were stopped in their car on a Mississippi highway by white men who believed the car was carrying civil rights supporters. Griffin and his passengers were nearly beaten to death. The Supreme Court ruled that the KKK Act allows for a civil lawsuit against private actors who conspire to deprive minorities of fundamental liberties such as the right to travel— a liberty right encompassed by the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment.

Since the time of Smith’s racist rampage, violent attacks on racial, religious, and ethnic minorities have sharply increased. Twitter and other social media platforms have given license to stigmatize these groups, and in some instances, to instigate violence against them. The white nationalism that fueled Smith’s Fourth of July murder binge in 1999 is a growing force that is making the once dormant Ku Klux Klan Act relevant again.